


Timor

by aliendater



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Lack of tags to avoid spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24328204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliendater/pseuds/aliendater
Summary: Maria was always staring inwards. Maria was always glaring outwards.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Timor

Maria was always staring inwards. Maria was always glaring outwards. She had forgotten how to stop, and forgotten that she had ever known. All she knew was that she could not stop, and that she was not happy. 

Not that she really knew the word happy either; the language she was once fluent in was another concept that she had forgotten that she had forgotten. There was no need for one when there would never be anything else like her to talk to. 

What language would a lone tree growing beneath the ocean speak?

What language would it think in?

Maria had never been human. She  _ almost  _ knew this, but she didn’t know that she  _ had  _ been something else once, billions of years ago. She wasn’t human, but neither was anyone else back then. What she  _ was _ , was  _ someone _ . Someone who was happy, sometimes. Someone who was scared, towards the end. 

Someone whose hairs hadn’t wrapped around everything, forming the paths that everyone would take, for their own amusement while she just stared. Whose blood didn’t burn those that fell in love with it. Whose very breathing didn’t suffocate the poor souls trapped inside her lungs. 

She had forgotten her life barely a million years into her  _ being _ . 

It had been a sad life, but not one without reason. She had lived in a world, had friends, had a purpose, and she had, at one point, been satisfied. 

When she was young, she had hid in a library of sorts, trying to avoid the prying eyes of her peers. She had fallen in love with the stories she found, hiding under the covers of books that no-one else seemed to even glance at. She spent so much time memorising them, drawing the connections together with a notepad and a pen, that one night she lost track of time, and never came home, only emerging from her hidden corner after she believed she knew everything there was, only to see that the world had advanced on without her. Her baby cousin was a grandfather, and people could talk without talking. 

She loved it.

Maria took delight in learning all she could about how the world had advanced. She learnt how to code, how to drive, and how to live in the digital age. She didn't learn about how people had changed, until it was too late. Until the world was torn asunder by crowds of billions of people desperate for something else, something truly new. 

In all the books she had read, she had never learnt about something like this.

Maria was scared. 

So she set out, looking for a book that would tell her what to do. She wandered alone, through the tattered landscapes and swollen corpses, looking for a way to put things back how they used to be. More than a few times she barely escaped fates too unpleasant to talk about,  _ almost  _ entirely thanks to blind luck. If she had been counting, she would have realised what was happening, but Maria liked to read, not count numbers. 

She never found the book. Instead she found the site of a ritual, a corpse held in position by thousands of webs, and a dusty bookshelf, filled to the brim with books, all of them empty inside. 

She didn’t notice the webs emerging from the body, even as they twisted around her like chains. Barely noticed them leading her through a door, and through another, until she reached a small room with only a single piece of paper in it. She didn’t even need their promptings to pick it up.

You see, there were things in her world, as there were in any other, that held power only when thought about. And Maria didn’t just think the words printed on that paper; she sang them with rhythmic glee that grew more and more enthusiastic as she got further down the page, believing that she had found the key to bringing her world back to normal; surely the rumbling around her was the planet stitching itself back together, surely the far off screams had gone silent because there was nothing to fear anymore, surely-

And then her eyes saw the very last sentence, and she understood. She understood more than she ever could have before. And that joy became dread became fear became- 

Maria watched her world vanish violently into nothingness, as she became dread became fear became terror- 

She was gone too, but not into a peaceful nothingness. She was all there was, intangible and constantly colliding and passing through herself. 

Billions of years passed in the blink of an eye for her new form, and a new world began to bustle with life. As she felt herself losing the ability to think, Maria saw life begin to form, saw single celled organisms evolve into something new, something else, something that could feel fear. The last thing Maria ever thought in words was that she  _ hated  _ them. 

Millions more years passed, and she watched humankind get off all fours and build its first tools. She watched them create languages, build civilisations, develop as a species and as many societies. And the entire time, all she could feel was something she may have once described as jealousy, though even before she picked up that piece of paper, before she even walked into that library for the first time, she was never very good at knowing her own emotions.

Humans tended to put things in boxes. They would feel her boiling blood, and declare it different from her icey tears, not even considering that they came from the same source. It cut her up, her body divided into parts. Her eyes had a Name, her hands had a Name, every part of her had a Name that didn’t suit them, but she was not even given that.

Maybe it hurt her, but she wasn’t sure. She just knew that it didn't make her happy. 

And then, the world ended, and she became real again.

Her hair fell in knots, and her tears made impacts with the ground, and her lungs expanded to crush all they met inside. She felt  _ something _ , and she felt it very strongly. All she could do was scream. But all anyone else could do was the same. 

The apocalypse lasted for a few intense months before she heard a man’s voice from inside of her. She realised instantly what it meant. She was going to die.

She did not want to die. 

_ She didn’t want to die. _

The voice got stronger, overtaking hers, filling her with a fear she had forgotten long ago, until she collapsed into herself, taking the world with it. 

Billions of years from then, another world, filled with another sort of people would exist. 

The dread that would hold the fabric of that place together had a name once too. 

Jon.

Jon was always staring inwards. Jon was always glaring outwards. He had forgotten how to stop, and forgotten that he had ever known. 

All he knew was that he could not stop, and that he was not happy. 

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first time writing creatively in a few years, but I hope you liked it anyway!


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